Is Allegorical Religion better than Fundamentalism?

[Angrboda]

I have to accommodate a sliver of suspicion about the critical thinking skills of anyone who, when faced with disagreement, starts immediately accusing the other of being biased and closed-minded.

[The Grand Nudger]

A guy can't even be wrong, just wrong, apparently. No, no no no. We must be afraid...or whatever. I'll be super disappointed if this was all some silly windup for a threat. That if we don't swear that we're going steady with someone else's besty... he's going to hurt us, after we die. Meh.

I've had alot of really frank and intimate discussions about afterlives, obviously with The Wife and with her family, but also members of my own and actual besties from childhood. It's just not something that comes across my mind often as a concern, and, when it does, I tend to be pretty satisfied with the contents of my life - a life lived in ways that are claimed to purchase me a ticket into all sorts of theme parks in the sky. Then again, I grew up in florida. I could always go to disney if I wanted to..I just never did. Me, I'm comfortable if there is an afterlife, and if there isn't. We already know that this is not the case for some afterlife believers. They seem to believe that things would be meaningless if there weren't.

Now that, right there, is real fear. I think that it would be extremely painful and produce alot of anxiety worrying that life was meaningless if there were no golden tickets.

[Belacqua]

I am inclined to define the soul as that part of human nature which is not understood (the poorly illuminated corners of being human, like consciousness, meaning, monsters, and so on).

I didn't realize we were discussing the nature of the soul, but I see what you mean here. 

That being said, these things remain fertile ground because we have no bottom-up explanation for them.  

I'm not sure what you mean by "fertile ground." Do you mean that people still speculate about it? That people are inclined to offer religious explanations because the scientific explanations are not yet available?

You're basically confirming my point that religion is about the extra-mundane.  Extra-mundane doesn't mean unfamiliar.

I don't see how I'm doing this. I just said that the mundane and the divine are not separate. That the divine is immanent in the mundane. 

We are all familiar with plenty of phenomenon that defies mundane explanation.  Put it into a different perspective.  Suppose in the 26th century we will have mapped out the brain and what is actually happening when a Zen monk experiences satori and it's readily demonstrated that there is nothing mystical about it.

I spent some years working on Zen in Japan, including time spent at an intensive retreat in the mountains north of Fukuyama. 

Satori was always presented to me as a change in perception. It is not magic, it doesn't involve the supernatural. It involves changing the habits of mind. It is spiritual, but it's not mystical at all (in the way that we think of Western mysticism).

I don't think any Zen person would be surprised or bothered by complete brain mapping. There would be no reason for him to change his religion at all. There is some question as to whether the experience could be artificially induced, since satori generally involves practices and personal experiences which would not be present if the same brain state were induced with electrodes or whatever. 

In this sense satori is similar to the Western mystics I mentioned earlier, who see revelation as improved perception of what has been there all along. The change is in the perceiver.

[The Grand Nudger]

Exactly so.

[Angrboda]

Well, satori aside, it's like the scene from the Incredibles which I posted in response to Neo where Syndrome says, "When everyone is super.... no one will be." Religion seems to require the sacred. Sacred literally means set apart. If there is nothing separating the phenomenon and the mundane, then how can it be sacred?

[Belacqua]

Well, satori aside, it's like the scene from the Incredibles which I posted in response to Neo where Syndrome says, "When everyone is super.... no one will be."  Religion seems to require the sacred.  Sacred literally means set apart.  

The separateness of the sacred has to do with the way people value and treat things. If a culture holds motherhood, for example, to be sacred, then it's sacred. I agree that religion often calls things sacred. But a sacred space or tree or ceremony, for example, need not be extra-mundane. 

Sacred: "connected with God or a god or dedicated to a religious purpose and so deserving veneration." Many things in this world may be connected with God, dedicated to a religious purpose, or deserving of veneration. The fact that something is set apart doesn't mean it's ontologically from a different world. A sacred tree is a tree, not a god. A sacred tradition is a tradition, not a god.

Sacred spaces are "set apart" because they are separate from the rest of the city. The courtyard in front of a Roman temple is a sacred place called a fanum. It is connected to the god, but it is not the god. It's a courtyard. Its separateness means that there are certain things you have to take care of before you enter the fanum -- pro-fane things. Its disconnection from the rest of the city means that people who are especially enthusiastic for the god spend a lot of time there -- fanatics. These people are connected to the god (or hope to be) but are not themselves gods.

As I've said a few times now, there are several religious traditions which hold that the divine and the mundane are not separate. The divine may be less visible to us, due to our habits of mind, but that doesn't mean it's far away. But I think I've said this enough times now, so I'll let it drop.

[JairCrawford]

@vulcanlogician I was just rereading through our earlier exchange in the thread and I realized I totally missed one of the specific things you asked. You mentioned the feeding story.

Do I think the whole thing is an allegory? As of this moment, no. I don’t have any issues believing that Jesus could multiply food at given times. But again that is a conclusion based on a decision in faith that I hold to, namely, if Jesus is God, which I believe by faith, then he wouldn’t have any problems carrying out such a task even though it’s not something we see happening regularly by any means. That’s a simple take of how I look at that.

That’s not to say that nothing in the account is allegorized, however. Do I believe Jesus actually used bread and fish? I’m open to the possibility that the food he actually multiplied might not have been bread and fish, but that bread and fish was used in the narrative for their symbolism. I’d say the same thing about the numbers. All the numbers in both feeding narratives seem to have some sort of ancient numerological meaning, making it more likely that the numbers were allegorical in the narratives.

So that’s how I currently approach the feeding narratives. I’m open to allegory in the narrative details, but I also don’t have an issue believing that Jesus could perform a miracle of multiplication either, so I still choose to embrace in faith that he did such a thing on some level.

[Jehanne]

Problem is that there are lots of stories regarding Jesus; for instance, do you believe that Jesus said the following:

Simon Peter said to them, "Make Mary leave us, for females don't deserve life." Jesus said, "Look, I will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven." (Gospel of Thomas, 114)

If not, why not? It's in an ancient source, and, so, worthy of belief and faith?

[JairCrawford]

Problem is that there are lots of stories regarding Jesus; for instance, do you believe that Jesus said the following:

Simon Peter said to them, "Make Mary leave us, for females don't deserve life." Jesus said, "Look, I will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven." (Gospel of Thomas, 114)

If not, why not? It's in an ancient source, and, so, worthy of belief and faith?

That’s a fair point and one I have thought about much more than in the past. I don’t know enough about the non canonical writings. By that I mean, it’s difficult to find consensus on them. Critical scholars have studied GThomas for a very long time but there’s still not really any solid consensus for whether it’s an old text or a text that post-dates the canonical writings (and by consensus I mean, discounting the consensus of theologians).

That being said, if I were to look at GThomas with a fully open mind, there are some red letter passages even in canon that I find… unlikely to have actually been said, so, that’s probably how I would tackle that specific verse in GThomas as well.

[The Grand Nudger]

Is there any pattern to or commonality between the things that strike you as less than genuine?